Pressing play button now requires Google recaptcha?

with some more or less recent update to the open.spotify.com player, Spotify stopped working for me (Firefox).Browsing Spotify works perfectly fine but anytime I press the play button nothing happens, meaning no music is played and the time indicator remains at 0:00.

As it turns out from the console logs and web-player.js, Spotify tries to connect to Google in order to use their recaptcha service to verify I'm not a robot. This does not work because I'm blocking requests to Google while on Spotify.

And to be honest, why shouldn't I?

My question is, are you planning on keeping this "feature"? Is it really necessary to have recaptcha "verification" on the play button even though a user is logged in?